‘Pride is better than some other things I could think of,’ says Clare. Marcie gives her a quizzical look, but doesn’t ask.
Before dinner Clare goes and lies down in the still and quiet of the bedroom. She leaves the windows open, though flies buzz in incessantly. She stares at the shadowed ceiling and wonders how long she will be able to stand it – being trapped, being lost, being so awake, and having the maddening presence of Ettore nearby. Outside the dogs bark a few times, like a scattered reflex reaction rather than a real alarm. A door closes sharply; not long afterwards she hears footsteps rushing towards her room.
‘Clare!’ Marcie shouts, her voice muffled by the door. Clare sits bolt upright, heart racing. ‘Clare!’ Marcie calls again, rapping on the bedroom door even as she opens it. ‘Oh, do come, Clare! It’s Pip!’
‘What is it? What’s happened?’ says Clare, grabbing at Marcie’s fluttering hands. The blonde woman’s eyes are frantic and there is a smear of blood on the front of her shirt. They rush out together. ‘What’s happened, Marcie?’
‘That damned dog! I should never have let him go near it,’ says Marcie, and Clare’s stomach clenches.
‘Has Bobby – has the dog attacked him?’
‘It was bound to happen – bound to! I should have put a stop to it! I’m so sorry, Clare!’ Clare can’t speak any more. She runs into Pip’s room with dread clutching at her chest, to find him sitting up on the bed watching the kitchen maid, Anna, bathe his hand in a basin of water. The hand is shaking visibly, even though his arm is resting on a pillow. There are two deep puncture wounds in the heel of it, dark and constantly welling blood.
‘Oh, Pip!’ says Clare, and rushes over to him. ‘Darling – are you all right? Oh, your hand!’ she cries.
‘I’m all right, Clare – really. It wasn’t Bobby’s fault…’ Clare sits down alongside him, and feels the way he’s shaking, just like she herself shook after the beating in Gioia. His face is sickly white.
‘Pip-’
‘I took him some crusts and jam – just like you suggested – and he loved them! He came to take them right from my hand. But then one of the other dogs barked suddenly, and he got scared…’
‘Oh, Filippo! You’re being altogether too brave – look at your poor hand!’ says Marcie. ‘Ought I call the doctor, Clare? Should they be stitched?’
‘I’m not sure.’ Clare watches as Anna dribbles water into the two deep holes. The water in the bowl is a merry red, berry bright. The sight makes her dizzy – that it’s Pip’s blood, and there’s so much of it. ‘I don’t think so. I think… just a tight bandage.’ She swallows, fights to keep her voice even. She holds Pip’s head close to her, and kisses his hair.
‘Clare, I’m really all right,’ he says, embarrassed, but there’s a catch in his voice. He might cry from the shock, if it weren’t for Anna and Marcie watching. It’s only pride that stops him, this new need to be manly.
‘You have to stay away from the dogs, Pip,’ she says.
‘But it wasn’t Bobby’s fault, Clare, it was-’
‘No, Pip, I’m sorry. He bit you – whatever the reason was! You must keep away. Promise me,’ she says. She pictures the heavy dog – the muscles beneath the shaggy fur, the mad, bewildered look in its eyes. If it got a proper hold of Pip it could tear him like paper.
‘But, Clare-’
‘No, Pip! Just do as I say!’ Pip turns away from her, glowers at his hand. At the foot of the bed Marcie hovers and wrings her hands. She can’t look at the wound.
‘Well, thank God you’re all right, Pip, that’s all I can say. How about a brandy to soothe your nerves, hm?’ She smiles anxiously at him, and turns to go, and Clare hasn’t the heart to object even though Pip is far too young for spirits. When Marcie brings the drink he sips it in a dignified manner, and staunchly refuses to cough when his throat objects.
Clare stays until Pip is asleep, with his fat, bandaged hand resting on his chest. She turns the knob on the gas lamp until it stops hissing and darkness rolls into the light’s wake. The floor is warm beneath her bare feet; she crushes a mosquito against her forearm, and rolls it through the tiny hairs there. She can still smell Pip’s blood. Anna has taken the gory water away but its metal tang lingers at the back of her throat. There’s a red spot on Pip’s bandage, and as she watches it gets bigger by tiny increments. She thinks of the naked man, being forced to graze like an animal; remembers the raw look in his eyes when he glanced up at her. She has such a sudden strong sense of the violence all around, the possible and the actual, that she has to grind her teeth together. It’s like an electric charge in the air; the hum before a lightning strike. She feels that everything is breakable, and will break; that anything could happen, and will. She wants more than anything to be somewhere else, anywhere else.
With steady, silent steps, Clare goes across the courtyard, from shadow to shadow between the pooling light of the lamps. From the kitchens, where the house staff are eating, come voices in the dialect, loud and mocking. She has to insist before the guard will unlock the front door for her, and in the aia the nearest dog growls with gut-deep menace. The aia is in darkness, a deep black for the dogs to hide in. Clare pictures teeth sinking into Pip’s flesh, cutting easily through the soft, elastic skin and the delicate red underneath. She thinks of Boyd leaving her naked in the library in Gioia, as shame washed out her arousal, and how now when they touch she can’t feel a single thread of a bond between them. Not since she saw Francesco Molino beaten near to death; not since she saw Ettore Tarano.
She’s running now, along the front of the masseria because she doesn’t dare cross the aia past the dogs. Her feet are almost silent without shoes. She feels the dust flying up between her toes, the prickle of stalks and stones. For a wild instant she thinks she could run away altogether – disappear into the night and never see her husband or Leandro Cardetta again. Back to Gioia and onto a train, to Bari, Naples, Rome, home. She turns blindly to begin this escape, taking the first few steps away from the masseria, but at once she’s surrounded by darkness so profound she can’t even be sure there’s ground at her feet. Everything vanishes. When she looks up there are no stars, and no moon. The light coming from the building behind her can’t penetrate it; the night is like a wall. She stops. A few paces – that’s what her flight has amounted to. A few paces, and she’s given up already. She hangs her head, defeated, and every nerve in her body feels as sharp as glass shards, so that when she hears movement in front of her, she gasps. Even as she asks who it is she realises that she knows, and there’s a subtle change in the way she feels – a change in the tension, which neither lessens nor increases but takes on a different tone: reaching out rather than coiling inward. She strains her eyes to see him but he’s merely a wraith until he’s standing right in front of her, with the weak light from the walls describing shoulders, hair, drawn-down brows. Ettore’s eyes look clouded and sore. Clare wants to tell him everything, and in the next moment finds she’s got nothing to tell.
Only when it seems like he will walk away can she speak and ask him how he is, ask about his sister’s baby, about his English. She sounds like a fool to her own ears, but she wants him to stay there in the vegetable garden so that she can work out what she’s feeling, and what it means. Why her eyes seek him everywhere, why the impossible vibrancy of everything she sees and smells and tastes is causing her to panic. She tells him that she hates it there, and that she wants to run away. The words are out before she can stop them, and though they’re honest she regrets them. She can’t find the right word and he provides it for her.